Fast Gaussian Elimination with Partial Pivoting for Matrices with Displacement Structure

I.Gohberg, T.Kailath and Vadim Olshevsky

Fast O(n^2) implementation of Gaussian elimination with partial pivoting is designed for matrices possessing Cauchy-like displacement structure. We show how Toeplitz-like, Toeplitz-plus-Hankel-like and Vandermonde-like matrices can be transformed into Cauchy-like matrices by using Discrete Fourier, Cosine or Sine Transform matrices. In particular this allows us to propose a new fast O(n^2) Toeplitz solver GKO, which incorporates partial pivoting. A large set of numerical examples showed that GKO demonstrated stable numerical behavior and can be recommended for solving linear systems, especially with nonsymmetric, indefinite and ill-conditioned positive definite Toeplitz matrices. It is also useful for block Toeplitz and mosaic Toeplitz (Toeplitz-block) matrices. The algorithms proposed in this paper suggest an attractive alternative to look-ahead approaches, where one has to jump over ill-conditioned leading submatrices, which in the worse case requires O(n^3) operations.

Related papers: The algorithms with partial and diagonal pivoting for Cauchy-like matrices and for matrices with other types of displacement structure are suggested in [GO94a], ( see also [GO94e] for the short version). Partial pivoting on an ordinary Cauchy matrix can be rapidly performed in advance, without actually performing elimination, see, e.g., [BKO94a], where it was called predictive partial pivoting. A transformation of Vandermonde-like and Cauchy-like matrices into Toeplitz-like matrices was utilized in [GO94c] to speed-up matrix-vector multiplication (to this end factor circulant displacements are considered). An explicit formula to transform polynomial Vandermonde matrix into a Cauchy matrix appeared in [BKO94a].

Key words: Gaussian elimination, partial pivoting, displacement structure Toeplitz-like, Cauchy-like, Vandermonde-like, Toeplitz-plus-Hankel matrix, Schur algorithm, Levinson algorithm.

AMS subject classification: 15A06, 15A09, 15A23, 15A57, 65F05, 65H10.


Papers Vadim Olshevsky's Home page ISL Stanford
Vadim Olshevsky olshevsk@isl.stanford.edu
Last modified: Fri Sep 15 1995